Middle America Meets Central Europe

Tag Archives: Bowling Green State University

[NOTE: When I was directing Bowling Green State University’s study-abroad program in Salzburg, Austria, in 1998-99, I wrote a series of letters to the faculty list back at BGSU. I got wonderful responses, so I kept writing them! This one, from October, 1998, reflects on how Austrian and German culture have absorbed and adapted American culture, including borrowing words, especially from popular culture, business, and high tech.

I wouldn’t come to all the same conclusions today. A lot has changed in twenty years – for example, Netflix is making many series produced abroad available to American audiences – and a lot sounds quaint and out of date, but a lot has stayed the same or continued to develop in the directions described.]

The Global Suburb

Last week I bought some potato chips–“Chips” in German–with the brand name “Funny-frisch.” “Frisch” means “fresh,” and Germans seem to think that “funny” is the adjectival form of “fun,” so this probably means “fun-fresh,” not “humorous-fresh”. The product and the name have the aura of America, where both the snack (German “Snack”) and the idea of eating for fun come from. Countless such borrowings show the pervasive influence of American and international culture in Germany and Austria, especially in business, popular culture, and high technology.

Many a German “Manager” hopes that his “Management” has the “Know-how” to provide the “Level” of “Service” required to avoid a “Flop.” Whether his “Business” involves “Leasing” or “Investment” in “Blue chips” (not to be confused with “Microchips” or “Funny-frisch Chips”), he will probably want to provide his customers with either a “Hotline” or “online internet business” opportunities–in short, “E-Business.”

The “Kids” in Central Europe are hip to “Hip-Hop” and “Rap-Musik,” of course, if they’re “cool.” If they watch “TV” they probably avoid “Gameshows” and “Talkshows”–the realm of the uncool–and prefer “Videoclips” on MTV.

One cable station fills the dead hours after midnight with uncommented footage of various “Raves,” especially last spring’s “Love Parade” in Berlin, a huge demonstration of resolute pleasure-seeking, a sort of urban Woodstock without illusions. The Love Parade’s motto, “One World One Future,” displayed in English on banners in mid-Berlin, is not unconvincing, even if global unity is being ushered in not by abstractions about peace, love, and understanding, but by CDs, McDonald’s, Gatorade, CNN, and the Internet. To paraphrase Brecht, “Fast Food,” then ethics. To be sure, the global suburb is peopled by the propertied: “Consumers of the world, unite!”

I haven’t checked to see whether the “Love Parade” has its own “Homepage,” but it wouldn’t take too much “Surfen” on the “Web” to find out. Whether with a “Notebook” or a “Desktop,” many Germans and Austrians are connected to the “Internet.” As might be expected, being “online” means being hooked up to a flow of American English terms like “Software,” “Hardware,” “Bytes,” “E-mail” and “Internet Service Provider.” You can check (“checken”) all this out by going to “Yahoo Deutschland” or one of the other German search engines. “Heute schon yahoot?” (Did you yahoo yet today?)

Even before the “Computer” became the conduit for the English language and American ways of life, the movies, television, and pop music were transplanting names, images, and words from California and New York to Frankfurt and Linz. American “Stars” are as well-known here as in the US. As the movie audience nibbles its “Popcorn” at the “Cineplexx” in Salzburg this week it can see “The Mask of Zorro,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Dr. Dolittle” with Eddie Murphy, “The Horse Whisperer,” “Lost in Space,” “Mafia,” “Armageddon,” “Godzilla,” and “Out of Sight.”

While I think it’s patronizing snobism to want to save the poor Austrians from such flagrant cultural imperialism–why shouldn’t they see the movies we watch?–it is too bad that most Americans will never see the other films in Salzburg this week–the cabaret film “Hinterholz 8,” or Niki List’s homegrown Austrian spoof “Heroes in Tyrol,” or “Lola rennt” (“Run Lola Run”), or the film version of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s novella “Krambambuli,” showing at the Mozart-Kino downtown. Too often we Americans do not benefit at all from the internationalism our culture has unleashed.

On television (public, cable, or satellite) this week you can enjoy the following American fare: “Full House,” “Mad About You,” “Baywatch,” “Star Trek Voyager,” “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “ER,” “The Simpsons,” “Alf” (remember “Alf”?–the Germans have never forgotten him), “Seinfeld,” “The Cosby Show,” “Married with Children,” “The Rockford Files,” “Friends,” “Suddenly Susan,” and “Who’s the Boss?”, to say nothing of the Hollywood movies, dubbed into German, but often with the original English titles (“Free Willy,” “Born to Be Wild,” “Bad Girls,” “Destiny,” “Tank Girl,” “Tin Men,” “Extremities,” and “Bananas.”)

But how many Americans are aware that after 24 years, the venerable police drama “Derrick” with its popular star Horst Tappert ran its last episode this past week? It’s too bad–although they’re importing “Homicide ” and “Law and Order,” Germans and Austrians have long been creating cop shows of the same caliber (I happen to like the genre). But who in the US has ever seen “Derrick,” or “Scene of the Crime,” or “Kottan on the Case,” or “Kommissar Rex,” or any of the other good shows that are filmed on the streets of Munich, Berlin, or Vienna?

“Derrick” is seen in Japan, the Netherlands, France, Israel, in 100 countries, but not in the United States. Is it stupidity or arrogance that makes US producers think that foreign fare won’t play? (Maybe that’s the same thing.) A TV special marking the end of this era is called “Goodbye, Derrick.” Not “Auf Wiedersehen, Derrick,” but a farewell in the language of Edgar Wallace and Hollywood. This is not just faddish; it shows a certain sensitivity to the cultural position of a German television police drama: we’ve borrowed from America, but made it our own.

There are many exceptions, but all in all Europeans are enriched by their knowledge of American culture. They learn English, and they’re globally oriented in a way that Americans simply are not, even though the means of global understanding through business, music, film, TV, and computers were largely developed in the US. Paradoxically, instead of using technology to bring the world to us, we use it to tell us our own stories to ourselves, over and over again.

You may protest that CNN and CSPAN bring the world to us, and indeed they are better than nothing. But while I can watch CNN here in Austria, I can also watch German news, Austrian news, and French news, and I could watch Italian news too if I could understand Italian.

While I can hear Madonna and the Beastie Boys, I can also hear Such a Surge and Rainhard Fendrich. While I can see “Der Soldat James Ryan,” I can also see “Solo fuer Klarinette” (Solo for Clarinet), a current German movie drawing much attention. American culture is available, even dominant, but not exclusive.

Granted, some broadcasters like RTL in Germany have succeeded in importing or imitating the worst of American TV. The “Talkshow” is now a fixture on German cable and satellite (still the only forms of purely commerical TV in Germany and Austria), and it is just as tasteless as at home. “The Wildest Police Chases in the World” is probably not the best ambassador of America. On the other hand, at least its viewers know that America exists, that it has big cars, wide roads, and desperately stupid drivers. They have seen it. What have Americans seen of Germany on television or in the movies? Not much.

So, even though a group of lexicographers in Germany called last week for contributions to translating English borrowings into “real” German, I am not concerned about Americanism ruining German and Austrian culture. Germanic tribes learned to make wine from the Romans, Caribbean islanders turned oil company junk into steel drums, South Africans claimed the electric guitar as their own, and British guys like Van Morrison and Eric Clapton turned Black American music into something that Black Americans like to listen to too: cultural clashes and exchanges have always been productive as well as destructive.

The Germans and Austrians, I trust, are smart enough to know which parts of American culture they want and which ones they have no use for. The “leveling” of culture is as much the triumph of the petit bourgeois (culturally dominant in the US) as it is an Americanization.

To throw out popular culture and its language because it is not German enough, or not “authentic” (whatever that might be), or not sophisticated, would not only be arrogant, it would be as foolish as if we threw out diplomacy and its language because it is French. Any attache worth her dossier seeks detente and rapprochement with as much finesse and elan as she can muster, without worrying about French cultural imperialism.

Besides, American culture is transformed when it is adopted. This dialectic is reflected in strange ways. David Hasselhoff is known in Germany not only as the star of “Baywatch,” but also as a singer. A singer? Something in the German taste (or lack of it–Germans invented kitsch, after all) can stomach this idea even if this American export never made it as a crooner in the US.

The live event of the year, with David Hasselhoff.

The dialectic is also reflected in the language, in the form of words and phrases that are English but not English at the same time, that somehow convey international panache (that pesky French again), but are puzzling to native speakers. “Happy ending” has become “Happy End” in German. An emcee is a “Showmaster.” Clearly English, but clearly not a word we use. And the now-ubiquitous cell phone is known here as a “Handy.” An English word, but who in Cleveland or Liverpool would know what you’re talking about?

And so English, mostly American English, pours in more and more. Commercials revel in it. Business pages cannot get by without “Joint Ventures” and “Crossrates.” “Singles” and “Teenager” buy “Singles” and “CDs,” the “Chartbreakers” they hear on “Melody FM” during “Drivetime.” Sheryl Crow is as big as she is in the US, and so are “Boygroups” like the Backstreet Boys.

But where is the reverse flow? Every German fan of Hip-Hop knows who Busta Rhymes is, but how many Americans get to hear Moses P., a German purveyor of fine rap? Granted, the heavy-metal group “Rammstein” (a pun on the name of a NATO air base) has had German-language hits recently in the US, but this is the exception that proves the rule. The last spate of German music on US radio was over 15 years ago (Nena, Falco, Trio). This does not mean that German pop musicians stopped making music with German lyrics after 1983.

Maybe because so many cultures are within our borders, we don’t need to hear German rock or Italo-pop. Maybe because we do so well exporting our shows, we don’t have an economic need to import others’.

But the economic power of the Hollywood industry isn’t all that keeps foreigners out. There is a corresponding aesthetic, something about the products themselves that recycles our self-images and keeps us from seeing beyond them.

For Europeans and others around the world, American culture is a window, but for Americans it is a mirror. America send its images out to the world, and much of the world happily welcomes their casualness, their directness, their fun. Americans themselves, however, don’t follow those images across the planet. America sells but it doesn’t buy. It stays at home, busy at its transmitter, only it hasn’t turned on its receiver. America is everywhere and nowhere.

NOTE: When I was directing Bowling Green State University’s study-abroad program in Salzburg, Austria, in 1998-99, I wrote a series of letters to the faculty list back at BGSU. I got wonderful responses, so I kept writing them! This is one from November, 1998. It is mostly a remembered monologue by a woman I met on the train. (I have rendered her speech as colloquial, not to condescend, but to show its relative distance from the standard written language.)

Life in Postwar Austria: An Oral Report

[I’ll let my train-compartment acquaintance tell her own story, which

includes, explicitly and implicitly, some themes of Austrian life: the

past vs. the present, rural vs. urban life, regionalism, families,

class distinctions, the importance of one’s dwelling, the ambivalent

relationship to authority, and the distance between ideal and reality.

I suppose these are themes of American life, too, but here they are

with an Austrian twist–Geoff Howes]

The scene: The 7:30 a.m. train from Salzburg to Vienna. It is Oct. 26,

the Austrian National Holiday, which commemorates the signing of the

law establishing Austrian independence and neutrality in 1955, although many Austrians

think it’s because that’s the day the last Allied soldier left

Austria. Offices and stores are closed, but of course the trains are

running. I arrive early and find a window seat in an empty

compartment. I get out my book, hardly cracked, and look forward to

reading for three and a half hours.

It is not to be. A middle-aged woman sticks her head in and asks if

the seats are free. Of course. She sits down across from me and starts

to talk. She had been in another compartment, but there were

foreigners there, and she just doesn’t feel comfortable with them. (I

resist telling her the shocking news that I’m a foreigner too.) She’s

going to Steyr to the “Christmas the Whole Year Round” exhibit. Maybe

she’ll find something nice for her grandchildren. She has to change

trains in St. Valentin. These kids have treats all the time. Not like

when she was young. “Then it was a cake on your birthday, and some

fruit and nuts at Christmas, and a little bit of candy on St.

Nicholas’ Day, but otherwise, no treats. We didn’t even eat meat,

except sometimes on Sundays. Times were different then, I can tell

you. These kids have cake and candy every day.

“You’re from America? Well, I’m sure you had to work hard for what you

got, too. Even in America there aren’t roast pigeons flying into your

mouth. Nobody hands it to you on a silver platter. I grew up in the

country, and we had to work hard. I like to work. I worked for twenty

years for the state government, in the Michael Pacher Strasse. I was a

telephone operator. Nowadays they don’t need telephone operators, the

computers do it all. But the service ain’t as good, and I especially

liked being friendly to the people. I don’t know why I had to retire.

Now I don’t do nothing all day. I’d fill in for vacation time for free

if they’d let me. That’s how much I liked to work. I’d do it for free.

Now I just collect my pension check.

“I grew up in the country. My mother worked on the mayor’s farm. He

was the biggest businessman in the village and the mayor, too. A fine

man. That was a different class of person in those days, I’ll tell

you. Both my husband and I were love children. My mother was in love

with the mayor’s son, and they were all ready to get married after

they had my brother, but then the mayor didn’t allow it because he

couldn’t have his son marrying one of the help. Then I came along too,

but they never did get married. Same with my husband. We’re both love

children.

“No, I’m not from Salzburg. I grew up in Carinthia. We’re a mixed

family! My husband is Styrian, I’m Carinthian, and my children are

Salzburgers. My son and his wife, they’re the ones with the two

daughters, have a house in Hallein, on the Duerrenberg. It’s an old

house, but they’ve really fixed it up. Spent all kinds of time and

money on it. I told them for the same money they could have got a new

house but for some reason they wanted to fix up this old one. First

they got it restuccoed and then they put on a new roof. You should

probably do it the other way around. They put in new plumbing, a new

bathroom, all new tile work. It’s very nice. But it took them a long

time and a lot of money. They did some of it themselves, but for some

of the work they had contractors do it. It would have cost less if

they’d had the contractors do it on their own time, but if you do

that, then you can’t make a claim for bad workmanship, because they

weren’t working legitimate in the first place.

“I change trains in St. Valentin. That ain’t for a while yet. What do

you think of the Austrian landscape, coming from America? Beautiful,

ain’t it? But they keep building more and more. Pretty soon there

won’t be no landscape left. All those new buildings. I worked in the

building inspectors’ office for the state government, on the

switchboard. You wouldn’t believe some of the things that happened

then. They let buildings go up and then it turned out they weren’t up

to code, and they knew it the whole time. Some of them were corrupt,

but not my boss. He was good to us. They did bridges, too.

“Yeah, we handled all of the building in Salzburg in those days. It

was a busy time. They were always building something. At the Christmas

parties we got together with the commissioners and everybody. They

invited us switchboard girls too. We thought we would go in together

and get the building commissioner a cake. He ate the whole thing all

at once! We said, did you like the cake. He said yes. We looked for

it, but he had eaten it all.

“But they treated us real good. I enjoyed going to work every day. I

lived just around the corner, so of course I had to fill in when

somebody was sick or the weather was bad and they couldn’t get in. But

I didn’t mind. I’d work for them now if they’d let me. They treated me

real good. I liked to work, and I don’t know why I had to retire.

“Got something wrong with my hand, it swelled up this big last week.

Don’t really know what’s wrong with it. I was picking flowers with my

grandkids and maybe I got hold of some poisonous plant. It swelled up

real big. Maybe it’s a pinched nerve, though. The doctors couldn’t

tell me. I spent the whole week going from the emergency room to the

internal medicine ward to a specialist, and now the swelling’s down

some and it don’t hurt as much but I still don’t know what’s wrong. I

honestly think they made it worse. This inflammation wasn’t here until

after the doctor felt my hand. They gave me something to rub on it. I

have to go back tomorrow.

“This is Wels. I don’t change until St. Valentin. I think that might

be the next stop. I’m going to Steyr. Maybe I can find something nice

for the grandchildren. Lots of people getting on here. Gruess Gott!

Yes, these seats are free. Please sit down. I’m staying on until St.

Valentin. I’m going to ‘Christmas the Whole Year Round.’ Have you been